Yes, I’m one of those coders who still uses TextMate, the four-year-old plaintext editor for Mac OS X. And when I say “four-year-old”, I mean it’s been four years since a major update. (Every now and then point updates are still pushed out, but TextMate 2 is the “Duke Nukem Forever” of the Mac text editor land. Oh wait.)

Anyway, I was browsing around for interesting plug-ins and came across one that purported to provide Quick Look functionality to the files in the project outline. Unfortunately, it wasn’t compatible with Snow Leopard. So, what’s a plug-in hacker to…

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Yesterday, I was trying to explain git add and git commit to someone, and hit upon these very clear ways (IMHO) of explaining them:

• git add adds changes to the next commit
• git commit saves any added changes to the (local) repository

Why is this particularly clear? It eliminates any notion of “tracked files”.¹ You use add whenever you want to record changes in your version history, whether files are new or not.

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In the Cocoa world, the big news from WWDC is the advent of Automatic Reference Counting, or ARC. The only real documentation for the system is an unlinked reference page on the Clang website, but as Clang is open source and the implementation’s in the latest builds now, that counts as public information.

The Cocoa frameworks have long used a reference-count-based system, but as of Mac OS X v10.5, Apple added optional garbage collection. As with most GC systems, you can mark certain references as __weak (which automatically become nil when their target is collected), and the actual collection of…

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